Deadly Games

  “Got it,” Akstyr said in a strained voice.

  He stood on the steps, his arm outstretched. A bug hovered in the air, inches from his open palm. The wings continued to flap, but it did not make any forward progress.

  Amaranthe raised her blade. “Shall I?”

  “Wait,” he whispered.

  Akstyr’s eyelids drooped, almost as if he were falling asleep, but Amaranthe knew better. She did not lower her sword and debated on simply ending it, but Akstyr needed practice to master his art.

  Seconds ticked by. Though she heard Maldynado rising behind her, she kept her eyes focused on the Fang.

  She opened her mouth to question Akstyr, but paused when smoke wafted from the insect’s wings. A heartbeat later it burst into flame. Amaranthe gaped as it burned to a crisp. Ashes trickled to the deck.

  “It worked,” Akstyr blurted, a grin on his face.

  “That was...disconcerting,” Books said.

  “Can you do that with people?” Maldynado asked.

  Akstyr shrugged. “Probably not yet.”

  Yet? The day he could do that would be the day Amaranthe feared Akstyr.

  “Let’s see what they were guarding,” was all she said.

  The large cubby in the back of the storage area held five diving helmets and suits as well as tubing and pumps.

  “Now that’s disconcerting,” Amaranthe said.

  “What is?” Maldynado asked.

  “The fact that Taloncrest booby-trapped the very equipment we need?” Books knelt to inspect the gear.

  “This does lend credence to our theory,” Amaranthe said. “That something’s down there in the lake and these people don’t want it discovered.”

  “So they killed the whole crew?” Maldynado asked.

  “It’s possible this doubled as an experiment. When I met that colonel, he was quite cheerful about furthering his research and didn’t seem concerned about deaths. Actually, he was looking forward to dissecting my cadaver.”

  “He sounds like a lovely fellow,” Maldynado said.

  “I’m not sure how experimenting with diseases could tie in with the kidnappings though.” Amaranthe reached up and gripped one of the beams over her head. “But if it is connected, and if there is a laboratory or hideout on the lake bottom, it might be handy to have a tugboat specializing in underwater operations.”

  “You want us to steal a ship?” Maldynado gaped at her. “Oh, Books is going to give you an extra hard time for that. He was whining when you just wanted the suits.”

  “Actually,” Books said, “if the owners of this vessel are all dead, I believe Maritime Salvage Law would be in effect.”

  “What?” Maldynado asked.

  Amaranthe grinned. “Finders keepers.”

  “You mean we get to have our own ship?” Akstyr asked. “Nice!”

  “Maldynado,” Amaranthe said, “want to come find the engine room with me? See if things are in working order?”

  “A tour through a part of the ship likely to be littered with more corpses? Nice of you to think of me.”

  “You could stay and help Books with the suits. Of course, I’d have to leave him in charge since he’s the underwater adventuring expert.”

  “No, thanks.” Maldynado headed for the door. “Last time he was in charge, he forced me to swim naked in glacial water.”

  A trapdoor in the center of the corridor led into the bowels of the ship. Amaranthe climbed down a narrow ladder, descending into a tight space crowded with machinery. Nothing clanked or whirred, and the cool temperature promised the furnaces had been dormant for some time. The air smelled less rank down there, though a faint singed odor came to Amaranthe’s nose, reminding her of a smelter.

  At the bottom, she took a step, lifted her lantern, and halted. “Uh.”

  Maldynado dropped down behind her. “What?”

  She pointed at a contorted lump of metal that resembled melted candle wax. “That’s the engine.”

  “It’s, ah...” He touched an amorphous protrusion that might have been a flywheel once. “Hm.”

  “A brief but sufficient description.”

  Maldynado walked around the contorted mess. “It’s melted right into the deck. You couldn’t even replace it with a new engine.”

  “It looks like someone wanted to make sure this ship didn’t engage in any underwater adventures while it was in town,” Amaranthe said. “If they saw it come into port, they might have seen it as a potential threat. Even if the treasure hunters had no inkling of what lay below, someone could have chartered the boat and used it as a base of operations for investigating.” She rapped a knuckle on the warped engine. “And, if this ship was a target, it stands to reason the Saberfist could be one too when it comes into port. We haven’t had good luck dealing with Mancrest, but maybe we should warn him that his brother’s ship may be in danger.”

  A clank answered. Maldynado had wandered to the far end of the engine room and was poking at a lock on a cast iron box set into the floor.

  “Are you listening?” Amaranthe asked.

  “Huh?”

  She sighed. Maldynado or Books would call her crazy for missing Sicarius’s company, but he always listened when she rambled on, speculating about their enemy’s actions.

  “Do you think we should warn Mancrest that his brother’s ship could be in danger?”

  Maldynado snorted. “I wouldn’t worry about a military vessel. The marines can take care of themselves.”

  “Against practitioners?” Amaranthe nodded toward the melted engine again. “I suppose it’s possible some sort of acid did this, but it seems more likely the mental sciences were involved.” She thought of Akstyr’s bug incineration trick above. She had seen him create a flame to light a candle, too. There must be an entire field devoted to heat and energy.

  But Maldynado had turned back to the lock and did not respond.

  “What’s so fascinating?” Amaranthe squeezed past a knot of pipes and joined him.

  “This is warm.” He perched on a small stool bolted to the deck next to the two-foot-by-two-foot box. Rivets secured the corners, steel hinges fastened the lid, and a padlock hung from a sturdy steel loop.

  Amaranthe touched the cast iron. A faint heat warmed the coarse metal. She checked to make sure the key was not dangling on a hook nearby, or something equally obvious, before fishing her lock-picking set from her pocket. “Scoot over.”

  “Ah, yes,” Maldynado said. “Books mentioned that you’d acquired that skill from Sicarius.”

  She selected a pick and a torsion wrench and bent over the lock. “Did he mention it in a tone of chagrinned concern for my deteriorating morality?”

  “Yes, but isn’t that his usual tone for all of us? And the world in general?”

  After a few minutes of wrangling the pins into submission, the lock clicked open. Amaranthe hesitated, thinking of Books’s advice. “It’s imprudent to open a strange box that may be booby-trapped with magic, isn’t it?”

  “How magical can it be? It’s part of a Turgonian ship.” Maldynado removed the lock and shoved the lid open.

  No explosions threatened to sear off their eyebrows. Good. Amaranthe peered inside, almost bumping heads with Maldynado.

  A bronze-and-iron rectangular device rested inside. Two small bars—handles?—stuck out from the ends, levers and dials dotted the sides, and a red, multifaceted glass knob protruded from the top. There was no bottom to the outer box, and the device appeared to sit on the deck, but something beneath it kept it from resting flush.

  Amaranthe tapped one of the handles. When nothing happened, she risked grabbing both sides and lifting. A collapsible pipe linked the bottom of the device to the deck beneath it, and she had no trouble raising it three feet. Two round concave pieces of glass set in the side closest to her made her think this was something one looked into. She was about to try it when the knob on top flared to life, emitting a soft crimson glow.

  She dropped the device. It clunked back to the
deck, but nothing untoward happened.

  “That’s definitely not standard Turgonian technology,” Maldynado said. He had relinquished the stool to her and crouched at her side, his shoulders fighting for space amongst levers and gauges protruding from a control panel beside him.

  “Maybe the Tuggle has been outside of imperial waters and acquired tools to help in its trade,” Amaranthe said. “Could this be some sort of underwater version of the Turgonian periscope? Like the ones used on army trampers for seeing over trees and brush? Only this one lets you see down into the water?” If so, that might be just what they needed. “These knobs and levers could be controls for rotating it and raising and lowering it.”

  “You’re an imaginative girl.”

  “Is that good or bad?” she asked.

  “Mind if I wait to pass judgment until after we see if you get us blown up by playing with that thing?”

  After giving the glowing knob a wary squint, Amaranthe pulled the device up again and leaned her face in so she could peer through the glass eyepieces.

  Blackness greeted her. She fiddled with the knob, which she could raise, lower, twist, and push in different directions. The view wavered, but she still couldn’t see anything.

  “Because it’s the middle of the night and dark down there,” she realized. “Drat.”

  Amaranthe started to draw back, but her sleeve caught on a small lever beneath one of the handles. It clicked. A beam of light shot out from somewhere beneath the viewing display, and it illuminated the water.

  “There we go,” she murmured. The blue-painted hull of the ship came into view, taking up most of the rectangular display. Not sure which lever or knob to push, she started with the handles themselves. The box twisted, altering her view below. “Ah.”

  Turning the periscope allowed her to see to either side around the bottom of the ship. Nothing more interesting than a couple of fish and the wavy green algae on the dock pilings came into view.

  “I wonder if this can go down deeper,” she mused.

  “Am I supposed to respond to your mutterings, or are you simply talking to yourself?” Maldynado asked.

  “It depends on whether you have an idea.”

  Maldynado pressed on the glowing knob.

  Bubbles of water streamed past the display until the view vanished in a swirl of sand followed by darkness.

  “Crashing it,” Amaranthe said, “isn’t what I had in mind.”

  “Oops.” He released the knob.

  The darkness faded again, and the view drifted up from sand, to seaweed, to water, and finally back to the hull of the tug.

  “Huh.” Amaranthe played with the knob and figured out how to move the viewer, not just up and down, but laterally as well. She had trouble fathoming how the latter was accomplished, but reminded herself magic was involved.

  She navigated the display farther from the ship and deeper as well, marveling as fish flitted through the light. Remembering their purpose on the ship, Amaranthe angled the view toward the bottom of the lake.

  Ruins—the foundations of long sunken buildings—protruded from the sand and seaweed. Amaranthe remembered some childhood trivia about the lake level being lower a thousand years earlier and of previous civilizations that had called this area home and built places such as the pyramid.

  Nothing more interesting occupied the floor, and she soon passed the last of the ruins. The sandy slope ended at a cliff plunging into blackness. She debated whether to back up and search north and south along the shoreline. Wouldn’t the kidnappers stay close to the surface for convenience? The lake was hundreds of feet deep out in the middle. While she considered her options, the viewer’s momentum, or perhaps a stray current, took it over the cliff. It dropped rapidly, and she decided to let it continue.

  Maldynado shifted from foot to foot. “Can I play with it?”

  “I’m not playing,” Amaranthe said. “I’m scouting. Our comrades’ lives are at stake. This is extremely important.”

  “All right. Can I scout with it?”

  An orange glow emanated from somewhere beneath the viewer, and Amaranthe forgot the conversation. Her insides twisted. Nothing natural could be making that light; this had to be the spot.

  As the device continued to drop, a great structure came into view, all painted metal and massive rivets running vertically and horizontally on the hull. Though the word hull came to mind, this construction looked nothing like a ship. It sat on the floor of the lake, reminiscent of a couple of mating octopi tangled in a tableau of passion. Tentacles—she did not know what else to call them—spread out on two levels, each tube large enough that, if they were hollow, men might walk through the insides. Here and there, bulbous protrusions—rooms?—stuck out. The two octopi “heads” were bigger, each the size of a house. Some of the larger protrusions had portholes, and she wondered if she could slip in close to peep through one.

  Cannon-like bristles on the ends of the “tentacles” stayed her hand. Weapons.

  Strange creatures swam about, too. Nothing she remembered from her science classes in school. A translucent golden fish glided into view, its sleek body pulsing with inner light.

  Something stirred in the seaweed below. The fish’s glow increased in intensity, and Amaranthe almost had to turn her head away, but then, with a flash, a streak of lightning shot from its body. The charred husk of some innocent lake dweller floated away.

  A shadow fell over Amaranthe’s viewer. She twisted the knob, pulling the device back and tilting it up for a look.

  A massive purplish blue creature floated there, tentacles—real tentacles—waving around it. A kraken. She had read of them, but they lived in the depths of the sea, not in freshwater lakes.

  A tentacle streaked toward the viewer. In the ship’s engine room, Amaranthe flinched, jerking her own head away.

  “Idiot,” she whispered. She leaned back in, clamped her hand on the knob, and pulled it back as far as it would go.

  But it was too late. The tentacle wrapped around the viewer, so large it easily blotted out the entire display. Amaranthe did not hear a crunch or snap—not with so much distance separating them from the device—but she sensed it. The view winked out, leaving only her reflection in the glass of the eyepieces.

  She stepped back, lowering her hands.

  “Do I get to use it now?” Maldynado asked.

  “Uh, sure.” Amaranthe rubbed her face. She hoped the kraken could not track the viewer back to the ship.

  “Wait, it’s broken.” Maldynado frowned at her.

  “Yes, and it’s possible we shouldn’t stick around. Just in case what broke it wants to visit.”

  Amaranthe jogged for the ladder.

  “I can’t believe you broke it before I got to play—scout—with it,” Maldynado muttered as he followed her.

  She almost gagged when she returned to the death stench of the corridor above. She glanced toward the storage area where she had left Books and Akstyr, but it was dark, so she headed outside.

  “Over here,” Books called as soon as she trotted onto the main deck. “We hauled four suits out, and we can go down tonight. This gear is brilliant. There’s no tubing except to these packs, which can be filled with compressed air. They must be magic of some sort. I can’t imagine we have the technology to—”

  “Not now, Books,” Amaranthe said. They had laid everything out on the side opposite from the dock. “It’s defended. We’re going to have to—”

  The deck heaved, throwing Amaranthe into Akstyr. She bounced off him and almost tumbled over the railing. It caught her in the belly, forcing an “Oomph!” out of her lungs. The far side of the ship rose, slanting the deck further, and she wrapped her arms around the railing, clinging like a tick lest she be hurled into the water.

  The men cursed, but the sound of wood cracking drowned their words. Everyone else had tumbled to the deck as well, and they were bracing themselves against the railing.

  “The suits!” Books cried, wrapping an arm ar
ound one helmet and his legs around another.

  “Blazing ancestors,” Maldynado yelled. “What’s going on?”

  As abruptly as the far side of the ship had lifted, it crashed down. Amaranthe flew from her perch and landed with a painful thump on the deck. The ship rocked, and water surged over the railings. A suit threatened to float away, and she grabbed it.

  “Get the gear and run to the dock!” she ordered.

  A tentacle thicker than a man’s body reared out of the water ten feet away. It stretched high, towering over the tugboat. The tentacle waved menacingly against the starry backdrop, then plummeted. It slammed onto the deck at the front of the ship.

  Metal groaned under the assault. A wooden ship might have been destroyed right there. As it was, the tentacle wrapped around the base of the crane and snapped the metal support, as if it were breaking a pencil.

  Amaranthe ripped her gaze away. The men were already scrambling across the rocking deck, slipping and flailing in the water streaming past. She grabbed the lone remaining helmet to go with the suit, groaning at the combined weight of the two items. On hands and knees, she clawed her away across the heaving deck after the men.

  The tentacle lifted the crane into the air and flung it with an irritable flick.

  The forty-foot metal arm flew out of sight, though Amaranthe heard it land. Wood smashed and cracked, and she feared another docked ship had been turned into a victim.

  The tentacle reared for another attack.

  She hustled faster. Fifteen feet to the railing and the dock beyond. Maldynado and Akstyr were already there, hurling their suits off the ship.

  The tentacle smashed into the main cabin this time. Wood shattered, and shards flew everywhere, pelting Amaranthe’s back as she continued to drag the heavy suit toward the rail. The tentacle thrashed. The roof caved in, and more waves rocked the ship. Beneath Amaranthe’s hands, the deck trembled under the stress, and the hull quaked.

  In seconds, the cabin was destroyed. The tentacle lifted from the wreckage and swept sideways across the deck.

  Amaranthe flattened. It came so close, the breeze ruffled her hair and cold water droplets rained onto the back of her neck. As soon as it passed over her, she sprang to her feet and sprinted the last couple of paces.